9 - Stories from a Pandemic: Bad Trip
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Why does isolation make the human psyche so fragile during a pandemic?
It doesn't take much for the human psyche to come undone. Anyone who's had a patient with ICU delirium knows this. Even after a relatively short time, sedated, paralyzed, and intubated, patients wake up disoriented in time and space with delusions and hallucinations. In some cases, they can even become aggressive or violent. Does this sound familiar? It's nine weeks into shelter in place, and looking around, I'm reminded again and again of how little it takes for people to lose it. We know the virus can't survive when we isolate ourselves. The question is, can we survive the isolation? This week many of you have shared with us what it's like to be a healthcare worker in a post surge world. For many, it feels like a sort of coming down.
The emergency is over, but we don't feel relief, just a lingering unease. This episode is called Bad Trip.
Ah, freedom. I just got out of work. And the first thing I always do the second I get off hospital property is take off my N ninety five. Feels like My face is finally free from the straps. of the coronavirus. You know, it's been much busier with psych patients. Although this last patient wasn't a psych patient. I was triaging a person who had Eaten. An edible for the very first time. And was extremely anxious. And needed a lot of reassuring but The kind of reassuring she wanted, she kept asking if everything was gonna go back to normal. And I kept telling her, Yes, don't worry, you're going to be okay. It's gonna go back to normal, like it was before. And uh then I realized, wait a minute. when most of us have been expressing the desire to just go back to how it was before it was
in relation to the coronavirus. Not from being high, so It's almost like every other day there's some new mind blowing experience. And it's just some new, strange reality that's so different from before. Like we can only process so much.
Lately I've been watching A lot of uh Netflix and been watching The Matrix again, rewatching it. Just keep thinking about The choice that Neo has to make. Whether he takes the red pill. and learns the unpleasant truth or whether he decides to take the blue pill and stays in blissful ignorance. Unfortunately, we all know that life is gonna forever be altered in ways that We can't fully predict yet.
Hello there. This is Jenny, um medical student from Philadelphia. Currently volunteering in transport. Last shift um I did was actually an afternoon shift, so I got to do something new. I got to do discharges of COVID patients. Our hospital has so many COVID patients that um they just do like one announcement a day. about how many are getting discharged that day and then play a little snippet of the Rocky theme song. Actually I went into a patient's room. to take them to C T scan when they made the announcement and played the like rocky music and then had to explain to that patient that they were not getting discharged. They were just going for a C T scan. Um so that was awkward. A few of the floors in the COVID building at my hospital, they're not meant for patients.
Um they're like outpatient rooms. And so they don't have any windows. There's you can't really like dim the lights. It's either like they're completely off or they're completely on. Um they took the doors off and sealed 'em off with tarps. Um not a lot of air circulation, there's no beds, it's just stretchers. And you know, there's not a lot of people going in and out of there, so It seems like it can get pretty lonely. I took a woman out of there last week who um was just like sobbing. Her test had come back negative and so I was taking her over to the non covet building and she was just like sobbing the entire time.
How did an ER nurse describe the mental toll of caring for COVID patients?
She was so Um So done with being in that room, she just kept saying, I can't take it anymore. And um when we got to her new room it had a window in it and she just started crying even harder. She was so relieved that it had a window in it. I don't think I really thought about like how isolated the patients were. And you know, now every time I take a patient over to one of those rooms and leave 'em there, it kinda breaks my heart a little bit knowing just how alone they're gonna be.
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